Wednesday, 12 December 2012

The Hand of History

There are not many jokes in communism. Actually that’s not quite true. A case
could be made that communism itself was a massive joke, except those living
under it dared not laugh, or laugh only at their personal peril. All humour in
what used to be called the Eastern Bloc was inevitably of a subversive nature.
For as George Orwell wrote, a thing is funny when it upsets the established
order; that every joke is a tiny revolution. The revolutionaries did not want
revolution; they wanted total conformity.

Have you ever been in a situation, or a place, say a church or a library, where
something struck you as funny? It may not be all that funny on later reflection
but just try to contain a laugh when it wants to explode!

I’ve been reading Anne Applebaum’s masterly Iron Curtain: the Crushing of
Eastern Europe, 1944-56, a
follow up to her equally masterly Gulag: a History of the Soviet Camps. There
are not many laughs in that, you may think. But you are wrong. I’m not at all
sure I could have survived the dull curtain of monotony that descended on Eastern Europe after 1945 for one simple reason – I have
an acute sense of humour.

You see, I would have been overcome with explosive fits of laughter over the
shear earnest pettiness of it all. Imagine going in to a bookshop and seeing
children’s titles like Six-Year-Old Bronek and the Six Year Plan. You
leave quickly, only to have your senses assaulted by a propaganda hoarding.
There it is, just across the street, boldly announcing “Every artificially
inseminated pig is a blow to capitalist imperialism!” Your lips are tightly
closed; the laughter is escaping like steam under pressure. You don’t want to
be seen so you turn away to look at the latest civic art, only to be confronted
by a painting entitled “The technology and organisation of cattle slaughter.”
Was the Berlin Wall really brought down, I wonder, by a great outburst of
laughter? Sorry, I should write the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall, to give its
official title.

Yes, there is humour in the story but the bigger picture is altogether bleak.
In picturing the history of communism in Eastern Europe
I see a façade, eaten hollow from within by termites. In the end the whole
thing simply collapsed under its inherent contradictions, to borrow a piece of
cherished Marxist terminology.

Let’s be absolutely clear about one thing: for people in places like Poland, particularly Poland, the Second World War did
not end in 1945. The immediate joy of ‘liberation’ simply gave way to an
understanding that a new occupation had taken hold, one that was to last for
decades.

The expression ‘Iron Curtain’ did not originate with Winston Churchill but it
was he who was to give it greatest resonance in speech delivered in Fulton,
Missouri in March, 1946;

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has
descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the
ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all
these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the
Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet
influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control
from Moscow.

Applebaum sets out her stall quickly. She refuses to entertain the revisionist
view that the imposition of communism throughout Central and Eastern
Europe after 1945 was a countermove to American policy at the
start of what was to become the Cold War. No, the importation of a Soviet-style
system was a deliberate ideological move, all part of the greater revolutionary
good. As she quite rightly says, there was a template already in place for this
in the Soviet occupation of Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania in
1940, states that had been consigned to Stalin under the terms of the
Nazi-Soviet Pact.

So far as Stalin was concerned there were also foreign policy advantages. The
new communist satrapies acted as a buffer zone in a period of growing East West
tension. More specifically, an independent Poland would clearly have been a
major political embarrassment to the Soviets, doubtless demanding the return of
those territories in the east of the country seized by Stalin in 1939 as part
of his satanic bargain with Hitler. For Poland it was a bleak choice
between extinction and communism.

As always the road to hell begins with noble intentions. Alongside the cynical
little Stalins, who had spent years licking the boots of their Master in Moscow, there were
genuine idealists, people who believed in the lie. They came as self-perceived
liberators, ready to free the working classes from capitalist exploitation.
They expected to be welcomed in their establishment of a brave new world.
Unfortunately for them it had real people in it.

The truth came quickly; the truth came in Poland. In 1946 the people
decisively rejected a communist-backed referendum. Perplexed, the government
rejected the people, concluding that they had acted in “some kind of
incomprehensible spirit of resistance and complete ignorance.”

Here I immediately fast forwarded to the events of June, 1953 inEast
Berlin, the first serious uprising against imposed communist rule.
Bertolt Brecht, the playwright, had hitherto served as the German Democratic
Republic’s tame intellectual and court poet. But even he had enough, offering
comment on the worker state’s suppression of the workers in his poem The
Solution;

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

That would seem to serve as the very definition of the so-called People’s
Democracies. In the place of real people came a hollow cardboard illusion.

Applebaum is splendid in her treatment of the high politics, in her description
of the appalling stooges who reproduced the bleak apparatus of Stalinism in
their respective spheres of influence: personality cults, purges, camps, bogus
trials, the whole depressing paraphernalia. She also offers a description of
the corrosive effects of communism on everyday life. Any kind of personal or
free expression, even in the most minor forms of liberty, was excised. Popular
consciousness was filled with the state and nothing but the state. One small
example serves here. The scout movement was banned as were all other private
societies. In 1950 inPoland
a seventeen-year-old girl met with friends from a former troop. All were
arrested and given jail sentences of two to five years.

Iron Curtain is a splendid piece of work, witty, perceptive, thoroughly
researched and superbly written. I was impressed enough to consider it the most
important book I’ve read this year, one that will make a lasting contribution
to our understanding of this period in history, a tragedy on which the final
curtain has thankfully fallen. My main criticism concerns the title. It’s not a
comprehensive history of Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1956, as the title
misleadingly suggests, but principally a history of three countries behind the
Curtain – Poland, East Germany and Hungary. There is next to nothing
on places like Romania,
where the whole communist experiment eventually descended to the most
degenerate form.

Don’t let that bother you. The history we are given is first class, a journey
into a heart of darkness. Iron Curtain is a book that is scholarly
and accessible, free of all condescension while losing nothing in the telling.
It’s a commendable achievement. I felt both exhilarated at deflated at the end,
especially after reading about the brutal suppression of the 1956 anti-communist
rising in Hungary,
which proved to all who were not blind that the liberation of 1945 was nothing
but a lie. I was exhilarated by the narrative and deflated by the fate of some
of our fellow Europeans, to whom history had dealt such a poor hand.

I wish I could agree that we have seen the final collapse of the Iron Curtain, but I fear it merely became redundant as the key elements of its purpose leached across and became woven into the fabric of the International Socialist EUSSR. Time will tell . . .

About Me

Hi, I'm Ana! History is my passion -and that is not too strong a word - but I also enjoy politics, philosophy, art, literature and travel. In addition I have a deep interest in witchcraft, in all of the ancient arts. Apart from that I'm a keen sportswoman. I play lacrosse and tennis, but I love riding most of all. I have my own horse, Annette.